My musings about human behavior and how we can design the world around us to better accommodate real human needs.

Saturday, November 02, 2013

Cheater's High

I read a great paper last night from the October (yeah, I am
on time with this one) issue of the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology by Nicole Ruedy and some of her colleagues.

What I like most about this stream of research is that they start
out with a dialectic hypothesis.Most
research assumes the people feel bad when they do unethical things.People feel bad when they are anticipating doing
something unethical, they feel bad when doing something unethical, and then
they feel bad when thinking back on an unethical thing that they have
done.

But they take what you all know is my favorite perspective –
“it depends.”Sometimes, we don’t feel
bad at all.They review a great deal of
literature to demonstrate that this is not just sociopaths who have no bad
feelings to have.They are talking about
all of us.And they are not talking
about the financial gain we get from some kinds of unethical activities. There are many kinds of unethical activities
where we feel a “cheater’s high” or a “duper’s delight.”They want to know when, where, and most
importantly, why.

And what they find is kind of a sad story about the human
condition, but resonates with me and probably most of you.First, let’s define the context.If someone is going to get hurt, we don’t feel
good about acting unethically.And if we
feel forced into acting unethically, we don’t feel good about that either.But when we freely choose the behavior and
when the only entity that gets hurt is some ambiguous corporation or society at
large, there are many cases where we feel good acting unethically.They speculate that this a combination of the
allure of the forbidden fruit, the dopamine rush of immediate gratification,
the sense of mastery that we got around constraints or outthought an entrenched
opponent on his home turf.

One of the strengths of the research is that they also
looked for ways to explain the previous research where people do report feeling
bad.Otherwise, they haven’t proved
anything.They controlled for
self-deception and confirmed that the people in their study knew full well they
were acting unethically.But what they
found is that we are very good at self-deception in other ways.When we are thinking about an unethical
behavior in the future, we convince ourselves that we will feel bad if we do
it.And then afterwards, we convince
ourselves that we feel bad as a result of having done it.The cheater’s high that they talk about is
the thrill of the moment – the only time we are really honest with
ourselves.It is the people who claim to
feel bad who are fooling themselves.This is the simple phenomenon of self-identity resonance that I have
blogged about beforehttp://humanfactors.blogspot.com/2013/10/self-identity-resonance-motivated.html.We like to think
of ourselves as good people, so we really do believe that we will feel bad if
we do something unethical.And we really
do misremember that we felt bad when we did it.

In fact, you are probably struggling with some self-identity
resonance as you read this.You probably
have at least half of your brain telling you that this research doesn’t apply
to you.Perhaps other people experience
cheater’s high during the unethical act and only feel remorse before and after.But not you.Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. This doesn’t make you a bad
person.You do feel bad if someone gets
hurt.You just don’t feel bad if it is
the proverbial victimless crime.You are
human.

Or maybe this resonates with you right away.Perhaps you realize or have always realized
that you feel this cheater’s high.Maybe
now you don’t feel so bad because you realize that so does everyone else.Happy to be the bearer of good news for you.